We analyse how payment systems for GPs and hospital specialists affect patients' inequalities in healthcare treatments, referrals, and health. We present a model of contracting between a purchaser and a GP and a hospital specialist, with patients differing in severity and socioeconomic status....

Integration of health care services has been promoted in several countries to improve the quality and coordination of care. We investigate the effects of such integration in a model where providers compete on quality to attract patients under regulated prices. We identify circumstances under...

The English government has encouraged private providers – known as Independent Sector Treatment Centres (ISTCs) – to treat publicly funded (NHS) patients. All providers are to be remunerated under a prospective payment system that offers a price per case treated, adjusted by the Market...

We present a model of optimal contracting between a purchaser and a provider of health services when quality has two dimensions. We assume that one dimension of quality is verifiable (dimension 1) and one dimension is not verifiable (dimension 2). We show that the power of the incentive scheme...

This paper develops a model of the supply of elective treatments within a duopolistic market structure where patients can be referred to the hospital with the lowest waiting times. We investigate the effect of a higher degree of substitutability among the two hospitals on equilibrium supply,...

We study the incentives for hospitals to provide quality and expend cost-reducing effort when their budgets are soft, i.e., the payer may cover deficits or confiscate surpluses. The basic set up is a Hotelling model with two hospitals that differ in location and face demand uncertainty, where...

We study the effect of competition on quality in markets such as health care, long-term care and education, when providers choose both prices and quality in a setting of spatial competition. We offer a novel mechanism whereby competition leads to lower quality. This mechanism relies on two key...

We study the relationship between competition and quality within a spatial competition framework where firms compete in prices and quality. We generalise existing literature on spatial price-quality competition along several dimensions, including utility functions that are non-linear in income...

This paper studies the impact of hospital competition on waiting times. We use a Salop-type model, with hospitals that differ in (geographical) location and, potentially, waiting time, and two types of patients; high benefit patients who choose between neighbouring hospitals (competitive...

Waiting times for specialist consultation and non-emergency surgery are often considered an equitable rationing mechanism in the public healthcare sector, because access to care is not based on socioeconomic status. This study tests empirically this claim using data from the Survey of Health,...